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Jason Scott
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Joined: 06 August 2012
Location: Scotland
Posts: 1167
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| Posted: 29 March 2024 at 8:22pm | IP Logged | 1
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I met Chris Claremont once when I was just coming into my teens, way back in 1989 at a signing in our local Forbidden planet. And I asked him that very question on whether he hated Cyclops as a character. As to my young self it seemed like the character was constantly being put through the wringer at that point in the American comics.
(Which stood in contrast to the earlier X-men stories I'd been reading in British reprints. Where Scott had seemed quite capable of meeting any challenge, and perhaps as a result was probably my favourite X-men character.)
In retrospect it was maybe a bit cheeky of me to ask him this, but I was probably too young to realise that at the time. Anyway, he responded that no he didn't hate the character of Cyclops, and said that the direction of the character had been taken out of his hands. Which I assume was him referring to the X-Factor title of the time.
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David Miller
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Joined: 16 April 2004
Posts: 3011
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| Posted: 30 March 2024 at 12:03am | IP Logged | 2
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John Byrne wrote:
We all remember the scene with Scott and Ororo in the Savage Land, which Chris scripted differently from how we had plotted it, so a deep dive into Scott’s personality became a feminist screed from Storm.
It was at that moment Cyclops became “a dick” in the eyes of many readers—something that stuck for years after. |
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I read the scene in Classic X-Men, after more than two years of X-Factor stories about Cyclops abandoning his wife and son and practically getting them killed, so this was about the most sympathetic I ever found him. Aside from Sons of Origins of Marvel Comics, my understanding of Cyclops was shaped by his monthly disgraces in X-Factor, contrasted with his emotional growth in the reprints of his former relationship with Jean.
When I first read that scene, I thought Storm was being unfair to Scott, and decades later I still do. Grief evokes complicated emotions -- "a weird combination of guilt, sadness and regret," is the unsettlingly matured way my seven year-old neighbor put it after his father's murder -- and sometimes none at all. Scott's feelings were as normal as normal gets.
The scene reminded me Scott's conversation with Nightcrawler in issue #109. Kurt took a similar tough love approach, but he did so to draw Scott out, and was frustrated when the opportunity was interrupted. Ororo just said her piece, then turned her back and walked away. Confiding to Storm like that was a breakthrough for such a repressed guy, and she let him down as a friend.
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Peter Martin
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Joined: 17 March 2008
Location: Canada
Posts: 15821
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| Posted: 30 March 2024 at 1:35am | IP Logged | 3
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The Scott Summers/Madelyne Pryor/Jean Grey triangle was basically a corner into which various writers had painted themselves, and somehow it was Scott that got the raw deal. He wasn't the problem. It was the writers! I don't blame particularly blame Claremont for it though. The things he introduced certainly didn't help Cyclops, but Claremont didn't know Jean was coming back -- and most of the damage was done in X-Factor once Cyclops was taken off Claremont's hands.
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David Miller
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Joined: 16 April 2004
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| Posted: 30 March 2024 at 2:17am | IP Logged | 4
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There was bad judgement up and down that storyline. When Paul Smith introduced Maddie Pryor, contra the captions and the dialogue, she didn't look very much like Jean Grey. While a thing for redheads wouldn't have been the healthiest basis for such a relationship, it could have had a psychological reality.
When Claremont's script insisted Maddie looked EXACTLY like Jean, it made Cyclops a psycho. There was absolutely no way a woman supposedly as normal as she was portrayed would have moved forward with that relationship. In retrospect, all the crazy retcons made more sense than the relationship did when it was played straight.
I wonder if more expedient solutions were considered, like mother and child dying in childbirth? Or even the baby dying and Maddie leaving forever. Maybe that would have seemed derivative of Fantastic Four #267. Probably not the way Claremont would have wanted to celebrate a 200th issue, but it would have avoided three solid years of Cyclops being a dick.
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James Woodcock
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Joined: 21 September 2007
Location: United Kingdom
Posts: 7636
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| Posted: 30 March 2024 at 7:40am | IP Logged | 5
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There is a pretty honest piece written by Claremont in the just released
latest Masterworks edition. You can read in for free if you read the Kindle
preview on Amazon.
He’s pretty honest that X-Factor was thrust in him & they all did the best job
they could figure out having had it been so.
He clearly didn’t want it to go the way it went, but felt he had no choice.
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Athanasios Kollias
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Joined: 27 September 2021
Location: Greece
Posts: 259
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| Posted: 30 March 2024 at 7:59am | IP Logged | 6
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I think Claremont is solely to blame for the Madelyne mess.No matter what other writers did, the fact that Madelyne was a Jean look-a-like, who survived a plane crash the moment Phoenix died on the moon, that she was working for Scott's grandparents and that she instinctively knew things about Scott very OBVIOUSLY meant he had something in his mind, linking Madelyne to Jean.
In X-Men 175 Jean marries Madelyne, convinced that Jean is dead because... reasons. He sees his mom and realizes Jean is dead. Why?
The whole mess afterwards didn't help at all, but it would have never been needed, hadn't Claremont gone that route.
Then Claremont brought Rachel back and made the mess even worse.
So you have a character, Scott, traumatized from childhood, losing the love of his life, then meeting basically her clone/twin, having a baby boy and then meeting a grown daughter from an alternate reality and then his love returns from the dead. I honestly don't know how any person on earth could cope with that.
It would have been probably simpler to turn Madelyne into Jean (possibly keeping the Byrne/Busiek take and introducing Sinister earlier as the guy who found Jean's body at the bottom of Jamaica Bay) . Not 2 years later, but a bit faster. And certainly not by retiring Scott.
Edited by Athanasios Kollias on 30 March 2024 at 8:00am
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Brian Miller
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Joined: 28 July 2004
Location: United States
Posts: 30907
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| Posted: 30 March 2024 at 1:06pm | IP Logged | 7
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The most baffling thing to me about her was her introduction. The
aforementioned sole survivor of the plane crash. And it happened in
AVENGERS ANNUAL 10. Yes, that issue had very particular ties to the X-
Men, but it just seemed so odd and out of place to have a, what?, one
page?, subplot in an annual for a totally different team book that went
absolutely nowhere. Until a few years later…
I could live with the whole Jean clone thing (it IS Marvel Comics after all),
but I didn’t at all care for the whole Goblin Queen thing.
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Matt Reed
Byrne Robotics Security
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Joined: 16 April 2004
Posts: 35741
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| Posted: 30 March 2024 at 3:01pm | IP Logged | 8
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You guys are making my head hurt! Reading this thread is forcing me to remember stories I had long repressed. Wild.
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James Woodcock
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Joined: 21 September 2007
Location: United Kingdom
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| Posted: 30 March 2024 at 3:40pm | IP Logged | 9
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The character in Avengers Annual 10 has been stated many, many times,
not to be the character that Scott marries.
Now, if someone has come along since & rewritten that, fair enough. But the
intention was not to link those two characters.
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Brian Miller
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| Posted: 30 March 2024 at 4:18pm | IP Logged | 10
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What? You can’t be serious. Two characters named Maddie Pryor are the
lone survivors of two different plane crashes that happen at the exact same
time? Which is also the exact same moment of Jean Grey’s death? And it’s
all written by the same writer? There’s no way that wasn’t meant to be the
same character.
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Rebecca Jansen
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Joined: 12 February 2018
Location: Canada
Posts: 4561
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| Posted: 30 March 2024 at 5:05pm | IP Logged | 11
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Scott having a relationship with Lee Forrester could have worked much better, stuff about him being on the rebound in the most extreme way and yet still wanting to be with Lee realizing this, and then later a straight head-on conflict when the lost love astonishingly has returned.
I think Claremont was just totally determined to get as much Phoenix back into the comic as possible, also a sort of cash cow even (see #153, cover of #157) because he wasn't the only one who hadn't gotten over Phoenix, a lot of the audience hadn't either. That and the Days Of Future Past being such high points with all the attention from the fans/fan press, both haunted the title seemingly ever after (Phoenix Jr./Rachel being another part of that), including after Claremont.
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Matt Hawes
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Joined: 16 April 2004
Location: United States
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| Posted: 30 March 2024 at 5:10pm | IP Logged | 12
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It's been awhile since I read "Avengers Annual" #10, but wasn't the "Maddy Pryor" in that comic a little girl at a hospital? I don't recall anything about her and a plane crash.
Edited: I no longer have a copy of the issue, but this thread prompted me to do a quick online search for her appearance. As I recalled, it was an incidental character and no mention of her being in an airplane crash:
Edited by Matt Hawes on 30 March 2024 at 5:21pm
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